Miscellaneous

Dr Who season list for MythTV

This is a list, for myself, of a mapping of actual seasons to season numbers I use in MythTV. This is necessary because Doctor Who went from seasons to series and MythTV only has one field. This means the latest “Series” will have different Season numbers to those expected – the world is an imperfect… read more…
Spark Sport – F1 Hyper Stimulator

Friday Spark Sport brought in the folks from Hyper Stimulator and put down a couple of their cars in the atrium at Spark City and let us have a go and boy was it fun. I really enjoyed it and those that tried had a great time also. In our case we were driving a… read more…
We will miss you Russell

This Thursday, the 19th of February 2015, saw the passing of my father in law and Josh’s grandfather Russell. He was 82. Josh and Russell always got on and we will all miss him. At heart Russell was a family man leaving behind 6 children, 14 grandchildren and wife Pat. The core of his life… read more…
Nikon Coolpix S8200 Review

Over the last 45 years I have been snapping away with little more than box brownies through film SLRs to todays digital cameras. My current budget dictates a maximum spend of around NZ$250 – firmly in the mid range of budget cameras. Like many I have been through a plethora of digital cameras starting with… read more…
HP Compaq dc7700 Small Form Factor

Summary The HP small form factor PC is a good choice for a fairly quiet media front end. I was able to put a fanless NVidia video card in it and its been pretty good. Ports/Slots PS2 Mouse and keyboard USB 8 SVGA Yes Modem None Ethernet 1 x Serial 1 x Parallel 1 x… read more…
Fix Firefox so it uses the Adobe Acrobat plugin for PDFs

Have you noticed recently that when you look at PDFs in Firefox the plugin doesn’t look quite the way you are used to, it’s more gray and doesn’t have any of that typical Adobe Acrobat look and feel to it. In particular if you move to the bottom of the window you don’t see the… read more…
Topaz, a Vantive application launcher

Topaz is a menu driven application launcher for Vantive. I created this program at home on my own time many years ago when I was involved with Vantive installations. It allows you to easily launch the Vantive Client, Forms Designer or Vantive Tools from a menu in the system tray. Background As you probably know… read more…